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Monday, March 15, 2010

'Writing' Women's Gender Interests into Policy

Abstract

This paper attempts to argue how the notion of the ‘public’ which occupies a central position in the field of planning must be treated as a discursive construct or a process involving a confrontation of different rationalities articulated from a variety of power positions.It takes on a feminist perspective that challenges normative standards of planning and funds allocation.Taking on the case study of the UNIFEM 5-page Report on its assistance to the gender responsive budgeting policy of the Philippines, this paper examines the position of UNIFEM vis-à-vis its framework for promoting gender responsive budget (GRB) initiatives by unpacking meanings of ‘gender’, ‘responsiveness’ and the vision of the public and private embedded in the Report and contest these meanings based on feminist critiques in their engagement with planning.

‘Writing’ Women’s Gender Interests into Policy

Unpacking Meanings in UNIFEM’s Report on the Gender Responsive Budgeting Policy of the Philippines

Introduction

The budget reflects the values of a country –

who it values, whose work it values and who it rewards …

and who and what and whose work it doesn’t.

– Dianne Elson

“The impetus for advocates for gender equality to focus on government budgets has come from a concern that government budgets have not been designed and implemented in ways that promote gender equality” (Elson, 2004:624).Indeed, Elson’s reflection on the budget as a mirror of the values of a country aptly points to the various, oftentimes, conflicting positions of actors in society that compete for resource allocation and that which almost always boil down to some being denied, nay, unrecognized in the partaking of such resources.This is with obvious referral to the oft-noted gender-blindness in the planning process where government budgets with its attendant gender-neutral instruments usually deal with numbers in aggregate levels and seldom about people, without the mention of either women and girls nor men and boys.

The growing clamor for ‘gender mainstreaming’ in government has thus attracted the attention of such organizations as the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)[1] which sought to make government budgets into better instruments for achieving gender equality.A gender responsive budget (GRB) looks into the varying needs of men and women and accordingly disaggregates the budget in terms of expenditure and revenue.“The National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women was one of the pioneers in promoting gender mainstreaming, through the formulation of a Gender and Development (GAD) Plan encompassing all government agencies in the Philippines” (Elson, 2004:629).The Congress of the Philippines through its General Appropriations Act began to include in 1995 a provision “mandating all government agencies to set aside a proportion of their allocation to projects designed to address gender issues” (ibid).

In consonance with its view that integrating a gender perspective in budgeting and planning processes will enhance gender equality by increasing resource allocations to support implementation of gender equality plans and policies, UNIFEM “supported a preparatory assistance (PA) for strengthening gender budgeting in the Philippines aimed to review the six-year implementation of the GAD Budget Policy and consider the role of the five percent GAD budget within the context of gender analysis of the total budget” (UNIFEM, 2008a).UNIFEM’s action presupposes its faith in the national and fiscal planning, a recognized public, as a space where gender concerns, taken to be within the purview of the private, maybe deliberated and become a venue for enhancing gender equality.

This paper does not seek, however, to discuss the accomplishments of the gender responsive budgeting policy of the Philippines nor does it tackle UNIFEM’s success in its support for strengthening the gender responsive budgeting in the Philippines.This paper instead aims to examine the position of UNIFEM vis-à-vis its framework for its support in strengthening gender responsive budgeting.By employing discourse analysis using the lens of the feminist engagement in the planning process, I would like to scrutinize some of its assumptions behind notions of ‘gender’ and ‘responsiveness’ as well as the ‘public’ and ‘private’ embedded in its 5-page Report[2]on “The gender responsive budgeting policy of the Philippines” between 2003 and 2005 that details the work of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW)[3] and reviews the six-year implementation of the GAD budget policy and relate these to the principles behind the gender responsive budgeting policy.

Understanding Policy Statement through Discourse Analysis

The task at hand is to examine the UNIFEM Report regarding its engagement with the strengthening of the gender responsive budgeting policy of the Philippines highlighting the work of the NCRFW with the use of discourse analysis.

Discourse is defined as an “interrelated set of texts and the practices of their production, dissemination, and reception, that bring an object into being” (Parker 1992 in Phillips & Hardy, 2002:3).Kress (1995 in Phillips & Hardy, 2002:4) notes that “texts are the sites of the emergence of complexes of social meanings, produced in the particular history of the situation of production, that record in partial ways the histories of both the participants in the production of the text and of the institutions that are “invoked” or brought into play, indeed a partial history of the language and the social system, a partiality due to the structurings of relations of power of the participants”.

By looking at the Report as text for analysis, I would like to develop a framework for understanding the principles guiding the gender responsive budgeting policy, the frames embedded in the meanings and assumptions behind the key concepts used by UNIFEM in its engagement in the gender budget initiatives in the Philippines. Considering Parker’s view that “social reality is produced and made real through discourses, and social interactions cannot be fully understood without reference to the discourses that give them meaning” (1992 in Phillips & Hardy, 2002:3), I also hope to reveal the power relations between and among actors within the interstices of the Report.

Here, I would like to make use of frame analysis only on selected key concepts in the Report in order to draw out the embedded meanings within such concepts.A frame “consists of a perspective and a mental model which acts like a filter through which a situation is observed and a problem is defined” (Truong, 2009).It “facilitates understanding or confuses an issue, particularly when the values behind the perspectives are assumed rather than openly discussed” (ibid).I would like to explore how the gender responsive budgeting policy as promoted by UNIFEM in the Philippines is phrased within mainstream planning influenced by economic-oriented definitions and technologies with its resort to simplified tools and quantifiable targets. I also argue that this framing of gender responsive budgeting policy within the text or language of the Report reflects the pervading power relations and material conditions in the society where the policy is basically couched in.

Scrutinizing the UNIFEM Report

Situating the Report

The Philippines stands out as a model for pioneering efforts in mainstreaming gender perspectives into politics and governance among the countries in Southeast Asia (Francisco, 2001:26).Although installing two female presidents[4] since the Nairobi Women’s Conference in 1985 neither represent the complete reform of a male-dominated system nor a definite testimony to the social equality of Filipino women and men as arguably these women, having ascended from political dynasties, merely stepped into politics to discharge their filial duties, it however represents an arena in which individual as well as organized Filipino women have been visible, at least in the realm of governance and political leadership (ibid).Notably, a gender-responsive development plan is in place with gender focal points and gender-awareness strategies existing in various agencies of both national and local government units.When the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China called for the incorporation of a gender perspective in the budgetary processes (Almazan, 2001:1), the Philippines obliged heretofore by instituting a Gender and Development (GAD) Budget Policy aimed at addressing gender issues in government and among clients, with the use of dedicated public funds (ibid).Certain women in the government led by the NCRFW as well as women’s groups lobbied for the passage of the GAD Budget Policy and NCRFW is presently the oversight agency in charge of coordinating the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the policy.

The GAD Budget Policy supported by a joint circular issued in 1994 requires government agencies (including local government units) to utilize at least five percent of their respective total budgets for programmes, activities and projects that address the needs and uphold rights of women.Although pegging the allocation at only 5 percent proved to be problematic because there was no concrete basis for valuing the GAD fund on a per agency basis aside from agency heads not being receptive to the policy, the NCRFW together with women gender advocates had a more positive view as it was “the first time that government had assured funding for GAD activities, and they vowed to ensure stronger implementation and compliance by all agencies concerned” (Francisco, 2001:28).Francisco (2001:29) notes that the expansion of the GAD Budget into the realm of LGUs has not only opened the public finance window to co-determination and access by ordinary women’s groups but has also become an enabling mechanism for broadening the democratic and participatory governance process.

UNIFEM’s campaign for gender responsive budgets for the past eight years through its global programme “Gender Strengthening Economic Governance: Applied Gender Analysis to Government Budgets”, launched in 2001 has contributed to building interest, capacity and commitment to incorporate GRB in budgetary processes by supporting initiatives in over 30 countries (UNIFEM, 2008b).UNIFEM however saw the initial gains of the GAD Budget Policy in the Philippines as partial in that it mainly “has been viewed as a separate process from mainstream budgeting and that it has also not been widely utilized by women’s groups as a lobbying tool to influence the main government budget” (ibid).Accordingly, “much of the work of the NCRFW has focused on the mechanism itself rather than on its objectives as it has not moved beyond the monitoring role of the Commission in assessing the extent to which government agencies were complying with the GAD requirement that five percent of the total budget be allocated for the advancement of women” (ibid).Thus, it justified its Preparatory Assistance (PA) for strengthening gender budgeting in the Philippines within this context.

The UNIFEM 5-page Report details the work of NCRFW as oversight agency in charge of coordinating the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the GAD budget policy.The Report enumerates the implementing partners of the GRB work in the Philippines including the NCRFW, Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), Department of Agriculture (DA), and Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP).It also provides a brief background of the gender responsive budgeting policy of the Philippines; UNIFEM’s justification for its support to the GRB initiative in the country; the realizations (gains and gaps) by far of its preparatory assistance including the process which highlights the participating key actors and stakeholders and underscores the role of key experts and policymakers; the priority components; the success indicators; and successful strategies (including engaging civil society organizations, capacity building as a built-in component, getting external technical expertise, and the participatory approach as a sustainability strategy) of the GRB initiative.More importantly, the Report provides us not only an indication of the progress of the gender responsive budgeting process in the Philippines but also a foretaste of the principles behind the policy as well as, as is the objective of this paper, a glimpse of the framework by which UNIFEM operates along with the assumptions behind such framework.

Framing the Gender Responsive Budgeting Policy

The discourse by which the gender responsive budgeting policy is set is within the frame of planning, what Escobar (1992:132) states as “the belief that social change can be engineered and directed, produced at will”.He however argues that planning has long been an unchallenged concept that has lent legitimacy to the enterprise of development where programmes though providing visibility to subjects like farmers or women, view them as development ‘problem’, making them objects of bureaucratic interventions.On the other hand, “gender planning can be defined as that approach to development planning which is based on an explicit recognition of the unequal gender relations between women and men in society, which are justified by symbolical codes” (Wieringa, 1994:829).Wieringa elaborates that “the effects of these unequal gender relations include a skewed sexual division of labour, unequal access of women to basic resources, a limited political representation of women, a certain tolerance for male violence against women and other elements which constitute women’s subordinate position in society” (ibid).In the course of the development struggle, however, gender advocates, in their quest for a “level playing field” still pursue “a range of instrumental arguments that link gender equity to more “legitimate” policy concerns, such as market efficiency, growth and human resource development – a strategy that has faced persistent criticisms from feminist scholars (Moser 1989; Goetz 1994; Jackson 1996 in Razavi, 1992: 1111).

Framing gender within neoclassical discourse embedded in national planning under the aegis of economic restructuring denotes an instrumentalist undertaking by UNIFEM. GRB initiatives which UNIFEM has been campaigning for operate within the framework of mainstream fiscal policy as well as national planning, programming, budgeting and monitoring processes. Speaking as an advocate of GRB initiatives, Budlender explains that "the budget has proven a useful place to start work on engendering macroeconomic policy because gender concerns are more visible in fiscal policy than in monetary policy” (AWID, 2008a).Speaking further, she maintains that “since budgets have an annual cycle, this focus allows the processes of analysis, problem identification, implementation of corrective measures, and monitoring and evaluation of impacts to be completed within a relatively short time and also that GRB initiatives can be implemented at the country level with a relatively small amount of resources" (ibid).

Thus, gender mainstreaming within the budget seems to connote an easier way “to put real women and men, and the messy realities of their lives and relations, at a certain distance, and turn them into the neat categories necessary for log frames, monitoring tools, and management systems” (Smyth, 2007:586).Smyth argues that at some point some terms which originated from feminist thinking and activism may have been depoliticised as “real women and men, power and conflict all disappear behind “bland talk of ‘gender’, while the language of ‘mainstreaming’ creates the possibility of orderly tools and systems through which profoundly internalised beliefs and solidly entrenched structures are miraculously supposed to dissolve and be transformed” (Smyth, 2007:583).This is clearly reflected in workplans, model for integrating GAD in the budgeting system, pilot-testing, and other technical tools developed for the project assisted by UNIFEM.

The Report underlines that the GAD budget policy “requires government agencies (including local government units) to utilize at least five percent of their respective total budgets for programmes, activities and projects that address the needs and uphold rights of women (italicizing provided)” (UNIFEM, 2008c).By using “women” instead of “gender”, the policy in itself commits the often interchanging of the two terms as if these are one and the same but which actually has more discursive and practical implications than imagined.The interchangeable use of the two terms also figures in the categories examined in the National government expenditures for disaggregation (a task by one of the implementing partners doing the Macro-Policy Research Component) such as ‘gender equality targeted expenditure’, women’s priority public services’, ‘women’s priority income transfers’, ‘gender management system in government’, gender balance in public sector employment’, and ‘gender balance in business support’ which has not been taken by UNIFEM’s Report as problematic.By implication, the banner of gender equality that UNIFEM has promoted in its initiatives therefore is bounded within the essentialised notion of gender power that is men versus women as it loosely accepts the confusion over the use of the terms.

In addition, there is also a significant assumption revealed here, that the term ‘gender’ as held by UNIFEM in its global advocacy suits with the local historically and culturally specific conceptions of the term in the Philippines or whichever country they may be operating which may not be the case in actual usage and experience.Culture needs to be considered in understanding the meaning of ‘gender’ within a specific context if it were to address fully well the issue of gender inequality for as Bourdieu (1990 in Truong, 1997:360) articulates, “culture is also a social field of force, a site of struggle over social meanings defined by relations of power.”

In policy discourse, the term “gender” has been commonly used in association with “mainstreaming” (Smyth, 2007:585).Smyth relates that “the notion of gender mainstreaming grew out of the realisation that the concerns for women and gender issues should not remain marginal to the ideas and practices of development organisations, but should be central to them, and hence located in their ‘mainstream’ yet the normalized association between the two accompanied by its bureaucratic connotation has come to hide[s] the element of power relations so essential to the original feminist understanding of the term” (ibid).

The spread of gender responsive budgets has promoted the aim to “provide governments, in collaboration with lawmakers, civil society groups, and other agencies, a mechanism to integrate a gender analysis into fiscal policies and budgets” (AWID, 2008b).Here, gender responsive budgeting as integrated in the folds of policy making suggests an implied notion of the public domain that is reminiscent of Habermas’ idea of the public sphere.In her work “Rethinking the Public Sphere”, Fraser (1993) critically assessed Habermas’ account of the “liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere”[5] saying that the very concept of public sphere arose not from discourse and consensus but from field of conflict, contested meanings and exclusion.It connotes “an ideal of unrestricted rational discussion of public matters which is open and accessible to all” (Fraser, 1993:113).

At the onset, the enumeration of different stakeholders in the UNIFEM Report seems to designate the institutionalization of gender responsive budgeting with the cozy participation of various actors in policy making.It further seems to suggest a more inclusive policy making process as one, ‘gender’, viewed to be within the purview of the ‘private’, has come to be integrated in the public domain of fiscal policy, and two, ‘responsiveness’,implying a better engagement between needs, goals, and impacts pertinent to gender concerns.But the division between public and private carried distinct gender implications.Women had generally been excluded from the more public spheres of life.It is much to assume that women’s entry into the public sphere of policy making, here national planning and budgeting, will come without resistance and will be welcomed by this male-dominated sphere with open arms.

If we take the idea of discursive participation to mean taking part in the public debate, the discourse of participation that is highlighted in the Report with the mention of the varying government agencies, academe, NGOs, and other project partners, entertains the idea of policy making as a public activity devoid of existing power relations -- diluting the presence or absence of exclusions or as if all actors are equally in the same plane without any impediments to participation or competing interests as they sit together in the policy making table.The Report’s stress on ‘greater and more meaningful participation by civil society’ as an important element in an engendered budgeting process and as one of the main success indicators of the GRB initiatives in the Philippines almost paints a rosy picture of the government and civil society working together towards a single, unified goal of gender equality and assumes civil society as one homogeneous group with similar interests, frameworks, ideologies, or even manner of working.

Conflating the poverty reduction goal of the Philippine government with the gender equality goal of the gender advocates also is problematic because “women’s subordination is not caused by poverty (Jackson 1996 in Razavi, 1997:1112).It is also important to quote Mariano-Diego (2008) in her Report to the 2008 UNCSW Meeting that the “national budget is almost often scarce and limited and there are many commitments and priorities that needs to be funded (to include debt servicing)”.In other words, budgeting as a political exercise is very much beholden to the priorities of whoever has the power over distribution and spending.Even prior to distribution and spending, this power covers determining what is presumed to be the needs of women and men and labeling what is worthy or not worthy of public spending as for example, whether domestic violence or sexual life which has essentially been relegated as a private affair would merit public expenditure.This is part of the rhetoric of privacy that excludes some issues and interests from public debate and contestation (Fraser, 1993:131-132).

UNIFEM’s Report also acknowledged some of the highlights of another yet related UNIFEM report in 2003 (Gender and Development budgeting in the Philippines: Issues, Challenges and Imperatives) which include the shift to a performance or results-based approach to gender budgeting as opposed to the 5% GAD budget and a greater involvement of the local Government and of the civil society in the budgeting process after this intervention (UNIFEM, 2008d).This acknowledgement appears to substantiate the “responsiveness” of the budgeting process with gender mainstreaming at hand by alluding to outcomes for women and how these outcomes relate to the budgets allocated as well as to the increased participation of more stakeholders like the local government and civil society.But a study conducted on the budget process of Malawi revealed that “the budget provides no realistic estimate of revenue or spending: the budget process is a theatre that masks the real distribution and spending” (GSDRC, 2004:iv).It further disclosed that “all the actors, from civil society, government, and donors seem aware that many of their statements and actions have little bearing on actual distribution of resources; yet all stakeholders ‘act’ as if budget planning and formulation will actually have a bearing on the actual implementation and distribution of resources” (ibid). This disclosure points to the interplay of powerful interests and informal incentives that weaken the capacity and commitment of other actors like the oversight agency, the NCRFW in the case of the Philippines, and civil society to fulfill their mandate.

Other than a political exercise, planning and budgeting remains to be a technical process undertaken by technical people.This means that there is much focus and trust on personal and technical skills of planners in the gender responsive budgeting endeavor.As its entry point to instituting change in the budgeting process, UNIFEM abides by this belief by emphasizing the role of key experts, policy makers, and technical working groups in the formulation of a detailed set of activities and agreed roles for each partner in accordance with a workplan and expected outputs as well as in the provision of inputs to the implementation project.This expert-driven approach does not seem to sit well with the idea of broader participation that the project advocates as it relies mainly on getting external technical expertise and presumes internal stakeholders as “recipients” instead of sources of knowledge produced from interactions within their own social reality.This also has implications towards the sustainability of the project as it may influence the appreciation of project processes and ownership of project outputs by stakeholders.

Pilot-testing of the project among selected agencies such as the Department of Agriculture (DA), National Dairy Authority (NDA), Department of Health (DOH), and the Quirino Memorial Medical Center also raises the question whether this is a coincidental choice or reflects the usual perception that women’s concerns or gender issues, for that matter, are limited to areas of agriculture and health.The Report affirms the choice of the pilot programs as being related to the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing poverty and hunger.But referring to the MDG goal itself is a telling marker of which areas women’s gender issues are cloistered as they are rather highlighted in education and health.Is the selection of the pilot agencies which mostly are health-related an example of the ‘gender jewel in the policy crown’[6]? Here Fraser’s note is useful, that caution should be exercised because the lifting of formal restrictions on public sphere participation does not guarantee inclusion in practice but may instead reproduce gender dominance and subordination (Fraser, 1993:132).Enclaving women’s interests or gender issues to certain designated arenas may prevent the broad interests and issues from being debated and contested in public.

Text and context: the power dynamics of ‘writing’ women’s gender interests into policy

It has been demonstrated so far that the Report on UNIFEM’s work in promoting GRB initiatives in the Philippines has more embedded meanings and assumptions regarding ‘gender’ and ‘responsiveness’ that have been left unquestioned.It has embarked on fitting ‘gender’ into mainstream planning through the budgeting mechanism accompanied by the technology of participation with experts occupying a key position.

Putting more emphasis on the process of integrating GAD in government planning and budgeting processes which include specific strategies to implement the recommended entry points could be considered as strength of the Report.The process maps out and analytically assesses stakeholder participation which could influence ownership and likely sustainability of the initiative.The tone of the Report indeed affirms the positive prospect of gender responsive budgeting as a way to improve the mainstream budgeting system with the view that it will in the end redound to addressing women’s gender interests.

However, what is not highlighted in the Report is the explicit understanding or definition by all parties (UNIFEM, NCRFW, and other stakeholders) of ‘women’s gender interests’ that is supposed to be factored in as the heart of the process, if this has been defined at all.Terminologies associated with ‘gender’ remains problematic and can lead to confusion which thus compromises the entire purpose for which such language is developed (Smyth (2007:583).Just as problematic as the term ‘gender’ is the diverging definition as well of women’s ‘gender interests’ especially towards their vision of social transformation.

Wieringa’s (1994:836) note is relevant here when she states that “women’s gender interests can only be discussed in a specific socio-historical context and they will be expressed differently by various categories of actors”.The Report does not tell us what specific gender issues and gender relations are there obtaining in the Philippine context and how budgeting may address such.Clarity as to what ‘women’s gender interests’ mean is necessary to be able to appropriately address them.Quoting Vargas, “women’s interests should be seen as ‘processes which are being constructed in specific historical contexts and in processes of confrontation, negotiation, alliances with men, with society, with the state and with other women, in short with society and its powers’ (Vargas 1992: 1 in Wieringa, 1994:836).Thus, the gender responsive budgeting process has to be keen on these specificities and intersectionality of position and experience in order to be ‘responsive’ to ‘women’s gender interests’.

The Report has also significantly left out the social and political dimension of planning and budgeting.It presents a sterile political environment by not including in the Report the problems, challenges, and prospects of integrating GAD in mainstream planning and budgeting in the Philippines, as if the whole process has been one smooth sailing ride.It also assumes away, as it is absent in writing, the power dynamics of widely varying stakeholders such as where they are located in the political spectrum including their party loyalties, the institutional capacities of the implementing partners as well as their level of understanding of and commitment to gender issues, among others.

Conclusion

Advocates of gender responsive budgeting such as UNIFEM together with its partners has gained momentum in sowing the seeds of gender consciousness within the national planning and budgeting processes of the Philippines.But the initiative is without a doubt a work in progress as there are still stones left unturned within the context of planning as a field of debate and contestation both in terms of backward and forward directions – backward, because it needs to revisit the frame that it has marked for itself in viewing the prospects of mainstreaming gender within the field of planning, the embedded meanings of key constructs of ‘gender’ and ‘responsiveness’, and the vision of ‘public’ and ‘private’ that it holds along with the assumptions it carries in its GRB initiatives; and forward, because it also needs to rethink the language of gender mainstreaming that it advocates, whether it envisions mere integration or radical transformation of the planning and budgeting processes. It needs to reflect whether it should maintain the rhetoric of gender equality in its initiatives or acknowledge diversity rather than equality towards a transformative vision of society.

Chhachhi, A. (2007) ‘Gender, Poverty, Livelihoods and Social Protection: Genealogy of a theme in Women, Gender, Development’, Development Issues Volume 9, Number 1, June 2007, retrieved March 20, 2009, from

Fraser, N. (1993) ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in C. Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 109-132. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press

GSDRC (2004) ‘The Budgets as Theatre – the formal and informal institutional makings of the budget process in Malawi Final Report’, The Political Economy of the Budget in Malawi, retrieved June 13, 2004 from http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/DOC51.pdf

[1]UNIFEM is the women's fund at the United Nations. Established in 1976, it provides financial and technical assistance to innovative approaches aimed at fostering women's empowerment and gender equality. It works with countries to formulate and implement laws and policies to eliminate gender discrimination and promote gender equality in such areas as land and inheritance rights, decent work for women and ending violence against women. UNIFEM also aims to transform institutions to make them more accountable to gender equality and women's rights, to strengthen the capacity and voice of women's rights advocates, and to change harmful and discriminatory practices in society.See http://www.unifem.org/about/brochure.php.

[3] The National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW) was established on January 7, 1975 through Presidential Decree No. 633, as an advisory body to the President and the Cabinet on policies and programs for the advancement of women. It is mandated “ to review, evaluate, and recommend measures, including priorities to ensure the full integration of women for economic, social and cultural development at national, regional and international levels, and to ensure further equality between women and men.” See http://www.ncrfw.gov.ph/index.php/ncrfw-profile.

[5] Habermas discusses this concept in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere which feminists assert as a historically specific and limited form of the public sphere, see Fraser’s (1993) ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’ for more critical discussion.

[6]“… third generation PRSPs continue to pigeonhole the discussion of women/gender into the education and health sections (the gender jewels in the policy crown now adorning the MDGs), with some discussion in the sections on labour markets (mainly micro-enterprises) and hardly any mention in the sections dealing with agriculture, land rights, rural development, environment..., see Chhachhi (2007).